


Love Is A Healthy Condition

by zetsubonna



Series: On Va Voir [20]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Anal Sex, Doctors & Physicians, Emotional Hurt, Hurt, M/M, Multi, Open Marriage, Open Relationships, Oral Sex, Physical Disability, Physical Therapy, Polyamory, Sex Work
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-24
Updated: 2016-06-06
Packaged: 2018-03-31 23:04:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3996499
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zetsubonna/pseuds/zetsubonna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam and his husband, Bucky, are <i>hetaera</i>: licensed sex workers with training in counseling and companionship. Their professional names are Falcon and Nuada, and they operate a private practice specializing in trauma care.</p><p>Bucky is going through a period of malaise and anti-social feelings, so he’s not accepting any new clients. Sam's newest patient, Steve, is a particularly difficult case, and Sam shares his personal and professional evaluations with Bucky, especially when he starts developing a stronger than usual sentimental attachment.</p><p>★★★<br/>A long-term, multi-part WIP, open for new prompts at my tumblr.</p><p>Do Not Repost</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Seeds of Heavenly Flowers

“You need a vacation,” Sam said, and Bucky was inclined to agree, but he was also inclined to be disagreeable. It was a formative flaw in his nature, or, at least, it had been since he’d gotten out of the business of blowing up little pieces of space.

“Where would  I go?” he grumbled, “What would I do? Half my job is accompanying people to beautiful places.”

“Rent an apartment,” Sam suggested. “Read a book. Brush off your camera, go visit Europa, take in nature. Be asocial, if you’re this tapped out of being friendly. There’s no rule that says you have to be on even if you’re on your own.”

“I don’t want to go into space. What if I run into a client?” Bucky’s scowl deepened. “I should rent an apartment with a sensory deprivation chamber, have the doctors take off my arm for a few days and just lay around naked in the sunshine for no reason except I feel like it.”

“And eat whatever you want,” Sam agreed. “Let yourself get a little softer.”

“Let’s not talk crazy,” Bucky said, snorting, and Sam grinned at him.

“Hey, nobody ever complains about the junk in my trunk,” he shrugged.

“We don’t all carry it in the form of a perfect ass,” Bucky said.

Sam laughed, glancing at their tablet on the edge of the table as an official looking set of files shifted in.

“What kinda folks we got incoming?” Bucky asked, picking up his coffee with his right hand, squeezing the warm ceramic in his chilly fingers.

“Oh, damn,” Sam murmured, scanning down the message as he came back, grabbing a slice of toast off their pile before he settled back in his own chair. “Nah, nah, you don’t need to hear about this, man. Get outta here. Go on vacation, I’m serious. You can’t provide comfort and solace to others if you’re not feeling well rested and nurturing, anyway.”

“Just tell me,” Bucky sighed.

“Artist,” Sam said, flicking his way down the touch screen. “Twenty-eight, space born, no family. Every fucking no-grav ailment in the book. Finally saved up enough cash to get himself physical restructuring, but it’s gonna take at least a year and hurt like Hell, so his doctors rec’d us for his breaks.”

Bucky raised his eyebrow. “Jesus. How’s he even managing down here?”

“I’d imagine he’s miserable,” Sam said. “Contract’s open-ended, so no telling how many sessions he’ll want, and with the blood damage and immune compromise, he’ll be delicate and probably ED. Gender preference was ‘surprise me,’ so we’re definitely candidates.”

He paused. “Well,  _I_  am. You need to go. Get out of here. I don’t want to see you in this place for at least a month.”

“Got a picture?” Bucky raised his eyebrows, and Sam shook his head.

“A client is a client. It doesn’t matter if he’s cute. Besides, I’m taking him. You’re going on vacation.”

“I’m minding your business,” Bucky announced, reaching for the tablet. “But I  _am_  going on vacation.”

The image was on the second screen. His vitals were above it. Steven was only 162 centimeters tall, owing to bone loss and muscle atrophy, and one of his pain sources was his back, due to the separation of his vertebrae. His circulatory system as a complete wreck- mutated red blood cells, immunodeficiency, low blood pressure, oddly formed capillaries due to the lack of gravitational effect on his cell structure as he was growing.

These days, people were required to keep their kids on planets until puberty, but Steve was Bucky and Sam’s age- long term micro-gravity exposure hadn’t been considered child endangerment until recently.

Bucky casually glanced down at the image. Dark blond hair, sad blue eyes with brows that looked tight, and a crooked jaw supporting a grimly set full mouth.

"You weren’t kidding. He’s wrecked.” Bucky sipped his coffee. “He also looks like he’s a stubborn little sonuvabitch.”

“He’ll have to be,” Sam said, shaking his head. “The bone replacements alone are supposed to be excruciating. If he wants to aim for full genetic potential, he could go up a foot in height, not to mention marrow injections and restructuring for stability. That shit  _hurts_.”

"You’ll be good for him,” Bucky said, smiling slowly. “You’re a teddy bear.”

“I seriously doubt he’s looking for a teddy bear,” Sam said. “But I’ll be whatever he needs.”

“I know,” Bucky nodded. “You’re damn good at what you do, Sam.”

“No point in doing it, otherwise,” Sam said, shrugging.

* * *

“I’ve sent your file around, discreetly of course, to a few of the contractors that work with our extended trauma care units,” Doctor Blake told Steve.

Steve wrinkled his nose and leaned back on one hand, reaching out for the file. “Any volunteers for a hard luck case?”

“A few,” he said, nodding, smiling gently. Doctor Blake was the chief orthopedic surgeon in charge of Steve’s bone reconstruction. He was a huge, handsome blond man with a well-kept little beard and hands almost as big across as Steve’s thighs. “Falcon and Nuada keep a suite in a residential tower two blocks from here. They work almost exclusively in rehabilitation, everyone we’ve sent to them has come back with their spirits bolstered somewhat.”

Steve smiled wryly. “You ever do this sort of thing for yourself, Doc?”

“When I lost my brother, in fact,” Doctor Blake said, his sunny smile becoming softer, eyes darting away and then back. “Lovely person. I recommend hetaera to all of my intensive care patients, Steve. My mother is one. Retired, but she enjoyed it very much.”

He drew in a deep, bracing breath, shifting slowly, trying to push his back up straight without letting his pain show on his face. “Explains why you look more like a model than a doctor,” he muttered.

“Thank you.”

Steve wasn’t so sure he’d meant it as a compliment, but that was one of the things he liked about Doctor Blake. Guy refused to let Steve’s mouth get to him, never flinched in his gentle, soothing bedside manner. He wondered if he’d ever be able to admit how much he appreciated it. Probably not.

He flipped open the virtual file for Falcon and Nuada on the tablet. They were stupidly handsome, both of them, almost as bad as Doctor Blake, with broad shoulders and full mouths that were full of possibilities. “Might as well give it a shot,” he said, shrugging noncommittally and passing the tablet back.

“I’ll have the nurses schedule you an appointment. Are you going to let me help you upstairs, or are you going to dislodge all my hard work being stubborn?”

Steve sighed. “You don’t have to guilt-trip me, Doc. General’s wearing off. I feel like six-day-old shit. You could almost talk me into being carried at this point.”

* * *

_He’s a different case,_  Sam wrote, when Bucky sent him a mail to check in after the second week. _Doesn’t talk about himself, doesn’t ask a lot of questions. Didn’t even want sex the first two sessions, just someone to curl into while he slept. Unfailingly polite, very respectful. Smells amazing. Hair’s softer than yours, outright downy. He’s like an angry kitten._

_Angry?_  Bucky wrote back. He was comfortable, in deep set tub full of jets that pumped across his back and rub his muscles. The screen for the computer was responsive to touch even from Bucky’s wet fingers, though it ignored, naturally, the metal ones. _What’s he angry about?_

 _Everything,_  Sam said, and Bucky and Sam had worked together long enough that he could see Sam’s full-on nurturing mode. _He’s lonely, he’s in pain, he’s sick, he’s struggling, he’s not working. Not working is driving him crazy._

 _He reacts to all of that with anger, huh?_  Bucky knew the feeling. He’d been that guy. He flexed his metal fingers, reminding himself he needed to do a full recalibration once he was out of the tub and dry.  _What was the third session like?_

There was a long pause in the messages, and Bucky grinned. Sam’s usual answers about clients were quick. If he was taking a minute, he either didn’t want to share yet, or he had a lot to say.

 _I didn’t expect him to be so aware of his body, considering how painful it must be for him to live in it, especially down here. He knows exactly how he works, and he’s aggressive about wanting to feel good. He can’t hold certain positions too long, but when he’s where he wants to be, he makes it absolutely clear. His eyes are either intensely staring, like it’s a challenge, or rolled back in his head when he’s blissed out. Also? He’s better at blow jobs than_ I _am, and I’m a goddamn professional._

Bucky thought back to the picture, the stubborn jaw and the plush, pink mouth, and imagined it wrapped around Sam’s cock, that pretty blond hair between Sam’s toned, muscular thighs, those big blue eyes wide open while he sucked it, and grinned to himself as he rolled his shoulders back against the side of the tub and the jets again.

_I know what you like. No gag reflex, makes a lot of noise, grabs your ass and takes it like a champ. You’re a bad man, Falcon._

_You’re just jealous. When was the last time a client sucked you off?_

Bucky closed his eyes and turned around, folding his arms on the side of the tub and laying his head down on them.

“I don’t think they ever do,” he muttered. “I mean, I don’t  _mind_ , but it’d be nice, I guess.”

He couldn’t help picturing himself, though, either in Sam’s place or peering over his shoulder, watching Steve’s expressions. He wondered if the little line that had been in his brows in his profile photo stayed if he were concentrating, if he were intent, if he _wanted_  somebody to just give him all he could take.

Bucky had trouble remembering the last time he’d slept with someone other than Sam for reasons other than work. He sighed as Sam pinged him again.

_New session tonight. No work thoughts. Work is fine. I’m holding down the fort. Enjoy your vacation, jerk._


	2. Specialization is for Insects

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which we find out a little more about the professionals in question, and their distressingly saccharine love story.

Bucky was twenty-six when his left arm got ripped off in a mining accident. They thought, since it happened on some godforsaken asteroid, that he was going to die, either of oxygen deprivation or blood loss, but he managed to cling stubbornly to life, seal off his own pressure suit, and stay conscious until he could get picked up and dragged to a hospital. Upon his arrival, he assured the doctors he was too goddamn stubborn to die, and promptly passed out.

They stitched him back up. It wasn't the best medicine, not out here on the edge of fucking nowhere, but it was serviceable. They could peel his stitching and scars open to give him a fully invisible prosthesis, if he wanted one. Bucky took a look at the work that had already been done to him, then the extensive amount of time and pain it would take to make his prosthesis cosmetically invisible and perfect, and vetoed that plan. A reader from the time he was three, he requested his new arm be made out of something as closely resembling silver as possible, and, once it was attached, he kept it polished until it shone.

The hetaera who helped Bucky get through his surgery called herself Evangeline. She was short, with a bright laugh and dark hair, and favored yellow dresses that made her look like a springtime fairy.

Bucky met Sam at school.

* * *

Sam was a combat medic, blessedly unscathed but for the visions of Hell permanently etched into his brain. He'd mostly cleared his reacclimation okay, but he'd been held through some pretty rough nights by a fellow veteran who went by Kestrel. Kess finished Sam's sentences and murmured low and soothing in his ear until he remembered where he was in the middle of the night.

When Sam decided he was well enough to try to finish rotating out of the service, he'd opted to use his discharge bonus to go back and get a degree in counseling, and found himself sitting in the middle of the third row, next to the guy with the one glove he kept forgetting to take off indoors in the brisk fall air.

"What's with the glove?" Sam blurted out after the first week.

Bucky shoved up his sleeve, flashing his metal forearm. "Can't feel it so I keep forgettin' it's there," he explained. "Remind me, huh?"

"Was worried you were making a reference and I wasn't getting it," Sam confessed. "Or I was missing a fashion trend."

"Not hardly." Bucky snorted. "Ain't bumped you with the elbow, have I?"

"Nah, but if you want to switch sides, we can," Sam offered.

"Only if we can also switch numbers," Bucky said, grinning.

Sam lifted his eyebrows and grinned right back.

* * *

"So what are you going to do?" Bucky asked on their second date, a month into their first semester. "With this, I mean? You're smart enough for med school. Wanna go into psychiatry?"

"M'smart enough, sure," Sam said, shrugging as he worked as much of Bucky's potatoes au gratin onto his fork as he could. "But residency sounds like a fuckin' pain in the ass, don't you think?"

Bucky grunted his agreement and nodded. He was already in love with watching Sam eat his food. He'd forget to put his own in his mouth, if he wasn't careful. He speared a green bean.

"What about you?" Sam asked. "Don't know what you're doing in mental health. You were a machinist, weren't you? You could design mining equipment, make that shit safer."

"Nah," Bucky said. "Hospital helped me figure out machines ain't as good company as people. Figured I'd have a run at seein' what makes 'em tick."

Sam gave him a slow grin that flashed the gap in his front teeth, and Bucky had to repress a squirm. "Sounds like you," he conceded. "You're a busybody, aren't you?"

"Little bit," Bucky conceded.

* * *

Six weeks later, their fifth date was a blur of shared ice cream and taking turns blowing each other on the pillow-strewn floor in front of Sam's couch, the video screen playing something neither of them would ever remember, much less finish.

"Know what we could do?" Sam said, grinning as Bucky's mouth canvassed his belly in the slowly fading light for the sixth time. Bucky's hair was silky and sweaty when he ran his fingers through it, so he kept doing it over and over. "W'our degrees, I mean."

"Mhm," Bucky said, squeezing Sam's ass in the most unsubtle indication of wanting to put it in his mouth Sam had experienced to date. "Lay it on me, Sam-my-lamb."

"Sex therapy," Sam ventured, his tone cautious.

Bucky paused, looking up. Blue eyes lingered on brown for about four seconds before Bucky said, "Marry me."

* * *

They finished in three years and at the top of their class. Sam beat Bucky for valedictorian by a hundredth of a point (Bucky never let him forget it) and got their professional permits and marriage license on the same trip to the courthouse. Bucky's settlement package from the mining company bought and furnished their practice suite by the hospital, and Sam's socked away pension checks covered the rent and utilities until they had enough regular clients to go back to saving.

* * *

Sam and Bucky ran into Evangeline and Kestrel at their first professional convention. Evangeline's civilian name was Evelyn Taylor, Kestrel was Sean Riley. They'd never met each other before, but they accepted the dinner invitation anyway.

"Nuada," Evie scoffed. "That's literary and pretentious, isn't it? A mythology reference, Buck? Really?"

"Evangeline is from a Longfellow _poem_ , which I have _read_ , on account of how _I am not a Philistine_ ," Bucky retorted. "You got no room to talk."

Evie giggled wildly into her wineglass, shrugging her indifference at getting caught, and Bucky slipped his foot out of his shoe to flirt with his socked toes on her bare ankle.

"You sure you want to go with Falcon?" Riley asked Sam, blushing from the shells of his ears to the back of his neck, a sight Sam had never seen before and wanted desperately to see how far down it went.

"Sure, I'm sure," Sam said. "I'm apparently real keen on guys from Irish Catholic families, too, in case you haven't noticed. His mom isn't Salvadoran, though. Jewish."

The blush worked its way past Riley's collar as he smiled shyly down into his beer. Sam licked his lips.

* * *

 Evie and Riley were even more fun in bed when they were off the clock.

**Author's Note:**

> Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own... Jealousy is a disease, **love is a healthy condition**. The immature mind often mistakes one for the other, or assumes that the greater the love, the greater the jealousy.
> 
> ~Robert A. Heinlein
> 
> [Hetaira](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hetaira) as explained on the Wikipedia. Please note: I use Heinlein’s spelling, _hetaera_ , as opposed to the proper Greek declensions, because this isn’t an ancient Greece AU, it’s a Heinlein ‘verse AU, and in his 'verse, the profession is almost exclusively female and declined as such.


End file.
